Leaders laud 60 years in Vermont for IBM, GlobalFoundries

Vermont’s top political leaders and the head of GlobalFoundries praised the contribution of the company and IBM during a celebration August 9 marking 60 years of making semiconductor chips in Vermont.

Speakers including GlobalFoundries CEO Sanjay Jha said Essex Junction remained an important manufacturing site because of the “perseverance” of the employees through changes that have occurred over those six decades.

“This organization, this site, has been through multiple ups and downs, multiple different versions of itself, and it’s evolved multiple times and what it has done is innovated every single time to become the next thing which is valuable to the industry,” Jha said in front of an outdoor crowd of hundreds of employees and dignitaries.

Two years ago, GlobalFoundries bought IBM. Today, there are approximately 2,800 employees in Essex Junction. At the peak of IBM in the 1990s, the company had more than 8,000 employees at the Vermont site.